Sunday, July 30, 2006

Not again

This morning, at roughly 5 am, my wife woke up and noticed lightning headed our way. She woke me up and we turned on the weather radio we got yesterday to listen to the NOAA broadcast. Sure enough, there was another severe thunderstorm warning and tornado watch in effect until 6:15 am and 6 am. We got dressed and got our stuff ready. We dressed the boy and awoke the girl and her grandmother. Shortly thereafter, the siren went off. We got a call from downstairs to invite us down. I put a pot of coffee to brew so we could wait out the storm. This time around, things were a bit calmer as we saw it coming rather than waking up to the siren. We had time, prior to the siren, to check TV and listen to the radio.

Last night, our son fell asleep with his hands over his ears in anticipation of the blaring siren. This morning, while we were dressing him, he put his hands up to his ears. He was prepared when the siren actually went off. The family has been glued to The Weather Channel these past two days. This is good from the awareness standpoint. This is bad because they may worry, unnecessarily, about some of the destruction possible if we were to have a tornado. We take the threat seriously because there was a tornado in Rice Lake, two or three years ago, that tore through the city. Our relatives tell us that they were shocked to see all the downed trees and destroyed homes as they drove in. They have pictures.

Perhaps the worst thing of all is that we have missed another opportunity, this weekend, to sleep late. I'm making it a point to take a nap today. I expect that we may have more awakenings in the coming days.